Paintings from the Berlin Museums Exhibited in Co-operation with The Department of The Army

The Detroit stop was the fifth venue on the sweeping American tour that brought over 200 paintings from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin to US audiences under US Army co-operation. Having moved through Washington, New York, Chicago, and Boston in the preceding months, the exhibition opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts on September 10, 1948 and ran for seventeen days through September 26. Of the two Vermeers that travelled with the show, only Woman with a Pearl Necklace (catalogue no. 138) was presented at Detroit; the DIA annual report described the exhibition as “the most successful ever presented to Detroiters,“ a reflection of the enormous public appetite for European masterworks in the postwar years.

The Detroit Institute of Arts brought particular resonance to an exhibition centred on German civic collections. Under its long-serving director Wilhelm Valentiner (1924-1945), a German-born scholar who had trained under Wilhelm von Bode at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum itself, the DIA had built one of America’s strongest holdings in German and Northern European art. Valentiner’s direct connections to the Berlin museums gave the DIA an institutional familiarity with the works on show, and his successor Edgar P. Richardson welcomed the tour to an audience already accustomed to the museum’s deep investment in the German and Dutch traditions.